Carl Weathers, actor, professional football player, and the only subject I could talk to my father about for more than fifteen seconds without trying to fight each other, passed away in his Los Angeles home at the age of 76.
Weathers found his star turn in “Rocky,” a film that my dad would often watch while lying on the couch when he was supposed to be keeping an eye on me. My unexpected shared interest in the film provided my father a brief hope that I would grow into the type of person to whom he could relate. Weathers reprised the role in three of the franchise’s sequels, giving years of fuel to a budding father-son relationship that was doomed to die on the vine.
1987 saw Weathers join the cast of the blockbuster action movie “Predator.” The R-rated film initially proved a barrier between my father and I, as my mother forbade me from watching any movies rated above PG-13. As I drifted closer to science fiction and fantasy rather than sports, it seemed as though our father-son bond might soon be permanently severed. Luckily, my mom took a job that required her to travel. This offered the perfect opportunity for my dad to secretly share with me the glory of Weathers’ severed arm falling to the ground, never loosening its grip on the trigger.
Before his acting career, Weathers played football as a linebacker both in college and professionally. I can’t tell you much more than that, but my father would often speak about it at length. I feigned interest and scrolled Reddit on my phone, never daring to interrupt these brief periods when I felt as though he respected me as a man.
Weathers showed off his comedy chops in Adam Sandler’s “Happy Gilmore,” a film that my friends and I would watch in my family’s living room while my dad stood silently in the doorway shaking his head. My father would later admit to “catching some” of the movie, saying it was, “pretty funny.” He did not initially extend the same praise to the television series “Arrested Development,” a show that I enjoyed and that my dad made fun of me for enjoying. His opinion changed suddenly when Weathers appeared as a recurring guest star, portraying a fictionalized version of himself. Subsequently, whenever he saw me watching an episode, he would ask me whether or not “this one [had] Carl Weathers in it.” If it did, he would sit down and watch it with me, laughing hysterically at all of Weathers’ lines. If it did not, he would make fun of me again and walk away.
Weathers leaves behind his wife, two sons, and my last chance of getting my father interested in Star Wars.